When the four original founders of mobius sat down to work out the real purpose, and hence unique value proposition of the agency, we were united in the idea that as a design agency, our designs had to be grounded in something real that gave purpose to what we created, not just something that answered some vague notion of what someone thought “looked good”.
On a macro level that meant that marketing imperatives drove the design process which was sufficient up to a point. What we quickly discovered however was that marketing strategy, whilst key in determining what you did, how you did it, where you did it and for whom, was not granular enough to make the small differences that set a brand apart and set the scene for the brand to be unique, resilient and enduring.
Brand strategy in action
We often remark that part of the value of working with mobius is that “we have run down literally hundreds of blind alleys on someone else’s dollar”. This may sound coarse, but like all truths – gets better in the telling, enhanced by time. Although this “running” was done in full day light and with the approval of those paying for the exercise, what happened was that an inexorable pattern emerged.
It is from this pattern that the Brand Genome process evolved, organically at first as we melded proven brand strategy techniques and formula, into our own end-to-end brand discovery and brand articulation process, narrowing it down to a set of key pillars that required interrogation, discussion, debate and testing in order for the brand platform to be properly formed.
Today, mobius’ Brand Genome has been applied (in some part at least), to almost two hundred brands, from small start ups with huge ambitions, to international brands with global reach.
